A More-Than-Social Movement: The Posthuman Condition of Quality in the Early Years

• In Event: 14.016 - (A)New Politics: Attuning to the Materiality of Pedagogies for Social Resistance in Times of Austerity

Abstract

Purpose:
This is a posthuman exploration of quality in early childhood education. It de-elevates the importance of the human subject and experience, and heightens a focus on tensions with the more-than-human. The argument traces the intricate web of ‘qualities’ woven throughout entanglements of subjects, objects and things that constitute what is referred to as ‘the early years sector’. The strike through the social in this post-human condition exposes critical concerns about the ‘problem’ of quality, and foregrounds the urgency of rupturing the status quo. Dislodged from the perceived comfort and safety of human control and determination, quality in the speculative state of the more-than-social movement can expect no conclusion. Instead, the (re)configuration of the early years sector as a more-than-social movement compels a rethinking of the dominance of human-centric philosophies. By repositioning Kristeva’s semiotic subject-in-process and Havel’s subject positionings within automatisms, this analysis inserts ‘non-human-being’ and ‘multiple beings-times’ into the ‘problem with quality’. In the early childhood sector, these ruptures create generative possibilities of quality entanglements with and beyond the human.

Theory/Methods/Data:
This article pushes the deconstruction of quality to further limits. It pushes the apparatus of quality beyond what Massumi (1992) calls a ‘threshold of sameness’, and engages in a productive response through the conception of ‘social movements’. Merging the competing discourses of shifts and movements that govern education in the early years and their multilayered, seemingly insatiable quests for ‘quality’, we (re)position the early years sector itself simultaneously as and as not a social movement.

We aim to crack the veneer to expose intricate webs of qualities woven throughout entanglements of subjects, objects and things that constitute what we refer to as ‘the early years sector’ and the movements already within the sector. In this sense, we are inspired by scholars who test and blur the boundaries of the human subject, subjectivity and autonomy (such as Barad, Bennett, Braidotti, Butler, Haraway, and Latour), and others who work within these tensions, as we continue the multi-species, subject<=>object dialogue by (re)thinking and (re)configuring conceptual understandings and theoretical assemblages of ‘quality’.

Insights & Significance:
This reweaving of human-centric philosophical perspectives destabilises their own focus, and foregrounds quality debates in entanglements of more-than-social, more-than-human, actants. The complex urgency that we acknowledge throughout critically introduces the vibrant forces of the material, the ‘matter with matter’ (Barad, 2015), inter-species and other-than-human relationships (Haraway, 2007), with cosmopolitical and ecological concerns that Latour situates in this time of the anthropocene. The nuanced insights opened up in these philosophical re-readings, revealing an already tangled inter- and intra-dependent web with and beyond human actors, to (re)imagine these thing/energy/natureculture connections in their messy, multidirectional, unpredictable performances of early years more-than-social histories, projects and realities. The meanings and energy inherent and produced in the philosophical musings expose unexpected onto-epistemological connections of human and beyond-human relationships with multiple wider worlds. Reconfiguring the early years sector as a more-than-social movement inserts ‘non-human-being’ and ‘multiple beings-times’ into the ‘problem with quality’. It pushes beyond the social, beyond quality: far beyond the threshold of sameness.

Authors

• Sonja Arndt, University of Waikato

• Marek Tesar, The University of Auckland